Real-time semantic segmentation is desirable in many robotic applications with limited computation resources. One challenge of semantic segmentation is to deal with the object scale variations and leverage the context. How to perform multi-scale context aggregation within limited computation budget is important. In this paper, firstly, we introduce a novel and efficient module called Cascaded Factorized Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (CF-ASPP). It is a lightweight cascaded structure for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to efficiently leverage context information. On the other hand, for runtime efficiency, state-of-the-art methods will quickly decrease the spatial size of the inputs or feature maps in the early network stages. The final high-resolution result is usually obtained by non-parametric up-sampling operation (e.g. bilinear interpolation). Differently, we rethink this pipeline and treat it as a super-resolution process. We use optimized super-resolution operation in the up-sampling step and improve the accuracy, especially in sub-sampled input image scenario for real-time applications. By fusing the above two improvements, our methods provide better latency-accuracy trade-off than the other state-of-the-art methods. In particular, we achieve 68.4% mIoU at 84 fps on the Cityscapes test set with a single Nivida Titan X (Maxwell) GPU card. The proposed module can be plugged into any feature extraction CNN and benefits from the CNN structure development.
With the increasing demand of autonomous systems, pixelwise semantic segmentation for visual scene understanding needs to be not only accurate but also efficient for potential real-time applications. In this paper, we propose Context Aggregation Network, a dual branch convolutional neural network, with significantly lower computational costs as compared to the state-of-the-art, while maintaining a competitive prediction accuracy. Building upon the existing dual branch architectures for high-speed semantic segmentation, we design a cheap high resolution branch for effective spatial detailing an…
Meta AI；Sorbonne University（索邦大学）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
We show how to augment any convolutional network with an attention-based global map to achieve non-local reasoning. We replace the final average pooling by an attention-based aggregation layer akin to a single transformer block, that weights how the patches are involved in the classification decision. We plug this learned aggregation layer with a simplistic patch-based convolutional network parametrized by 2 parameters (width and depth). In contrast with a pyramidal design, this architecture family maintains the input patch resolution across all the layers. It yields surprisingly competitive t…
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；DeepMotion AI Research（DeepMotion AI研究院）
It has been widely proven that modelling long-range dependencies in fully convolutional networks (FCNs) via global aggregation modules is critical for complex scene understanding tasks such as semantic segmentation and object detection. However, global aggregation is often dominated by features of large patterns and tends to oversmooth regions that contain small patterns (e.g., boundaries and small objects). To resolve this problem, we propose to first use \emph{Global Aggregation} and then \emph{Local Distribution}, which is called GALD, where long-range dependencies are more confidently used…
This paper introduces a concept of layer aggregation to describe how information from previous layers can be reused to better extract features at the current layer. While DenseNet is a typical example of the layer aggregation mechanism, its redundancy has been commonly criticized in the literature. This motivates us to propose a very light-weighted module, called recurrent layer aggregation (RLA), by making use of the sequential structure of layers in a deep CNN. Our RLA module is compatible with many mainstream deep CNNs, including ResNets, Xception and MobileNetV2, and its effectiveness is v…
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Sensetime Research（商汤科技研究院）；University of Texas at Arlington（德克萨斯大学阿灵顿分校）
To satisfy the stringent requirements on computational resources in the field of real-time semantic segmentation, most approaches focus on the hand-crafted design of light-weight segmentation networks. Recently, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has been used to search for the optimal building blocks of networks automatically, but the network depth, downsampling strategy, and feature aggregation way are still set in advance by trial and error. In this paper, we propose a joint search framework, called AutoRTNet, to automate the design of these strategies. Specifically, we propose hyper-cells to…
Transformer-based models have been widely demonstrated to be successful in computer vision tasks by modelling long-range dependencies and capturing global representations. However, they are often dominated by features of large patterns leading to the loss of local details (e.g., boundaries and small objects), which are critical in medical image segmentation. To alleviate this problem, we propose a Dual-Aggregation Transformer Network called DuAT, which is characterized by two innovative designs, namely, the Global-to-Local Spatial Aggregation (GLSA) and Selective Boundary Aggregation (SBA) mod…
Nankai University（南开大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Hefei University of Technology（合肥工业大学）
Recent progress on salient object detection mainly aims at exploiting how to effectively integrate multi-scale convolutional features in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Many popular methods impose deep supervision to perform side-output predictions that are linearly aggregated for final saliency prediction. In this paper, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate that linear aggregation of side-output predictions is suboptimal, and it only makes limited use of the side-output information obtained by deep supervision. To solve this problem, we propose Deeply-supervised Nonlinear Agg…
DCELANM-Net:Medical Image Segmentation based on Dual Channel Efficient Layer Aggregation Network with Learner
School of Computer Science, Hubei University of Technology（湖北工业大学计算机学院）；Lublin University of Technology（卢布林工业大学）；Lviv Polytechnic National University（利沃夫国立理工大学）
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；Baidu Research, Baidu Inc.（百度公司百度研究院）
In the stereo matching task, matching cost aggregation is crucial in both traditional methods and deep neural network models in order to accurately estimate disparities. We propose two novel neural net layers, aimed at capturing local and the whole-image cost dependencies respectively. The first is a semi-global aggregation layer which is a differentiable approximation of the semi-global matching, the second is the local guided aggregation layer which follows a traditional cost filtering strategy to refine thin structures. These two layers can be used to replace the widely used 3D convolutiona…
In this paper, we present a novel recurrent multi-view stereo network based on long short-term memory (LSTM) with adaptive aggregation, namely AA-RMVSNet. We firstly introduce an intra-view aggregation module to adaptively extract image features by using context-aware convolution and multi-scale aggregation, which efficiently improves the performance on challenging regions, such as thin objects and large low-textured surfaces. To overcome the difficulty of varying occlusion in complex scenes, we propose an inter-view cost volume aggregation module for adaptive pixel-wise view aggregation, whic…
Modelling various spatio-temporal dependencies is the key to recognising human actions in skeleton sequences. Most existing methods excessively relied on the design of traversal rules or graph topologies to draw the dependencies of the dynamic joints, which is inadequate to reflect the relationships of the distant yet important joints. Furthermore, due to the locally adopted operations, the important long-range temporal information is therefore not well explored in existing works. To address this issue, in this work we propose LSTA-Net: a novel Long short-term Spatio-Temporal Aggregation Netwo…
Institution for Advanced Computer Studies（高级计算机研究所）；University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
We present Temporal Aggregation Network (TAN) which decomposes 3D convolutions into spatial and temporal aggregation blocks. By stacking spatial and temporal convolutions repeatedly, TAN forms a deep hierarchical representation for capturing spatio-temporal information in videos. Since we do not apply 3D convolutions in each layer but only apply temporal aggregation blocks once after each spatial downsampling layer in the network, we significantly reduce the model complexity. The use of dilated convolutions at different resolutions of the network helps in aggregating multi-scale spatio-tempora…
Existing methods for single images raindrop removal either have poor robustness or suffer from parameter burdens. In this paper, we propose a new Adjacent Aggregation Network (A^2Net) with lightweight architectures to remove raindrops from single images. Instead of directly cascading convolutional layers, we design an adjacent aggregation architecture to better fuse features for rich representations generation, which can lead to high quality images reconstruction. To further simplify the learning process, we utilize a problem-specific knowledge to force the network focus on the luminance chann…
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Kandao Australia Research Center（看到科技澳大利亚研究中心）
Deep neural networks have shown excellent performance for stereo matching. Many efforts focus on the feature extraction and similarity measurement of the matching cost computation step while less attention is paid on cost aggregation which is crucial for stereo matching. In this paper, we present a learning-based cost aggregation method for stereo matching by a novel sub-architecture in the end-to-end trainable pipeline. We reformulate the cost aggregation as a learning process of the generation and selection of cost aggregation proposals which indicate the possible cost aggregation results. T…
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have become the state-of-the-art for most computer vision tasks with natural images. However, these are not best suited for multi-gigapixel resolution Whole Slide Images (WSIs) of histology slides due to large size of these images. Current approaches construct smaller patches from WSIs which results in the loss of contextual information. We propose to capture the spatial context using novel Representation-Aggregation Network (RAN) for segmentation purposes, wherein the first network learns patch-level representation and the second network aggregates co…
Traditional grid/neighbor-based static pooling has become a constraint for point cloud geometry analysis. In this paper, we propose DAR-Net, a novel network architecture that focuses on dynamic feature aggregation. The central idea of DAR-Net is generating a self-adaptive pooling skeleton that considers both scene complexity and local geometry features. Providing variable semi-local receptive fields and weights, the skeleton serves as a bridge that connect local convolutional feature extractors and a global recurrent feature integrator. Experimental results on indoor scene datasets show advant…
The process of aggregation is ubiquitous in almost all deep nets models. It functions as an important mechanism for consolidating deep features into a more compact representation, whilst increasing robustness to overfitting and providing spatial invariance in deep nets. In particular, the proximity of global aggregation layers to the output layers of DNNs mean that aggregated features have a direct influence on the performance of a deep net. A better understanding of this relationship can be obtained using information theoretic methods. However, this requires the knowledge of the distributions…
The University of Melbourne（墨尔本大学）；UBTECH Sydney AI Centre（优必选悉尼人工智能中心）；The University of Sydney（悉尼大学）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Video inpainting aims to restore missing regions of a video and has many applications such as video editing and object removal. However, existing methods either suffer from inaccurate short-term context aggregation or rarely explore long-term frame information. In this work, we present a novel context aggregation network to effectively exploit both short-term and long-term frame information for video inpainting. In the encoding stage, we propose boundary-aware short-term context aggregation, which aligns and aggregates, from neighbor frames, local regions that are closely related to the bounda…
University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Localization of anatomical landmarks is essential for clinical diagnosis, treatment planning, and research. In this paper, we propose a novel deep network, named feature aggregation and refinement network (FARNet), for the automatic detection of anatomical landmarks. To alleviate the problem of limited training data in the medical domain, our network adopts a deep network pre-trained on natural images as the backbone network and several popular networks have been compared. Our FARNet also includes a multi-scale feature aggregation module for multi-scale feature fusion and a feature refinement …
We propose a new approach to video face recognition. Our component-wise feature aggregation network (C-FAN) accepts a set of face images of a subject as an input, and outputs a single feature vector as the face representation of the set for the recognition task. The whole network is trained in two steps: (i) train a base CNN for still image face recognition; (ii) add an aggregation module to the base network to learn the quality value for each feature component, which adaptively aggregates deep feature vectors into a single vector to represent the face in a video. C-FAN automatically learns to…
Baidu Research（百度研究院）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Interactive video object segmentation (iVOS) aims at efficiently harvesting high-quality segmentation masks of the target object in a video with user interactions. Most previous state-of-the-arts tackle the iVOS with two independent networks for conducting user interaction and temporal propagation, respectively, leading to inefficiencies during the inference stage. In this work, we propose a unified framework, named Memory Aggregation Networks (MA-Net), to address the challenging iVOS in a more efficient way. Our MA-Net integrates the interaction and the propagation operations into a single ne…
This paper investigates how to perform robust visual tracking in adverse and challenging conditions using complementary visual and thermal infrared data (RGBT tracking). We propose a novel deep network architecture called qualityaware Feature Aggregation Network (FANet) for robust RGBT tracking. Unlike existing RGBT trackers, our FANet aggregates hierarchical deep features within each modality to handle the challenge of significant appearance changes caused by deformation, low illumination, background clutter and occlusion. In particular, we employ the operations of max pooling to transform th…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
Reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) has made significant progress in producing realistic textures using an external reference (Ref) image. However, existing RefSR methods obtain high-quality correspondence matchings consuming quadratic computation resources with respect to the input size, limiting its application. Moreover, these approaches usually suffer from scale misalignments between the low-resolution (LR) image and Ref image. In this paper, we propose an Accelerated Multi-Scale Aggregation network (AMSA) for Reference-based Super-Resolution, including Coarse-to-Fine Embedded PatchMa…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Kuaishou Technology（快手科技）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；SmartMore（思谋科技）
Video super-resolution (VSR) aims to utilize multiple low-resolution frames to generate a high-resolution prediction for each frame. In this process, inter- and intra-frames are the key sources for exploiting temporal and spatial information. However, there are a couple of limitations for existing VSR methods. First, optical flow is often used to establish temporal correspondence. But flow estimation itself is error-prone and affects recovery results. Second, similar patterns existing in natural images are rarely exploited for the VSR task. Motivated by these findings, we propose a temporal mu…
This paper aims to learn a compact representation of a video for video face recognition task. We make the following contributions: first, we propose a meta attention-based aggregation scheme which adaptively and fine-grained weighs the feature along each feature dimension among all frames to form a compact and discriminative representation. It makes the best to exploit the valuable or discriminative part of each frame to promote the performance of face recognition, without discarding or despising low quality frames as usual methods do. Second, we build a feature aggregation network comprised o…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；The Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）
This paper presents a Neural Aggregation Network (NAN) for video face recognition. The network takes a face video or face image set of a person with a variable number of face images as its input, and produces a compact, fixed-dimension feature representation for recognition. The whole network is composed of two modules. The feature embedding module is a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) which maps each face image to a feature vector. The aggregation module consists of two attention blocks which adaptively aggregate the feature vectors to form a single feature inside the convex hull spann…
Vehicle re-identification is an important computer vision task where the objective is to identify a specific vehicle among a set of vehicles seen at various viewpoints. Recent methods based on deep learning utilize a global average pooling layer after the backbone feature extractor, however, this ignores any spatial reasoning on the feature map. In this paper, we propose local graph aggregation on the backbone feature map, to learn associations of local information and hence improve feature learning as well as reduce the effects of partial occlusion and background clutter. Our local graph aggr…
n this paper, we propose an effective and efficient pyramid multi-view stereo (MVS) net with self-adaptive view aggregation for accurate and complete dense point cloud reconstruction. Different from using mean square variance to generate cost volume in previous deep-learning based MVS methods, our \textbf{VA-MVSNet} incorporates the cost variances in different views with small extra memory consumption by introducing two novel self-adaptive view aggregations: pixel-wise view aggregation and voxel-wise view aggregation. To further boost the robustness and completeness of 3D point cloud reconstru…
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Despite the remarkable progress made by learning based stereo matching algorithms, one key challenge remains unsolved. Current state-of-the-art stereo models are mostly based on costly 3D convolutions, the cubic computational complexity and high memory consumption make it quite expensive to deploy in real-world applications. In this paper, we aim at completely replacing the commonly used 3D convolutions to achieve fast inference speed while maintaining comparable accuracy. To this end, we first propose a sparse points based intra-scale cost aggregation method to alleviate the well-known edge-f…
University of Torino（都灵大学）；University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）；Edinburgh Napier University（爱丁堡龙比亚大学）
It has been demonstrated that deep neural networks outperform traditional machine learning. However, deep networks lack generalisability, that is, they will not perform as good as in a new (testing) set drawn from a different distribution due to the domain shift. In order to tackle this known issue, several transfer learning approaches have been proposed, where the knowledge of a trained model is transferred into another to improve performance with different data. However, most of these approaches require additional training steps, or they suffer from catastrophic forgetting that occurs when a…
Visual recognition requires rich representations that span levels from low to high, scales from small to large, and resolutions from fine to coarse. Even with the depth of features in a convolutional network, a layer in isolation is not enough: compounding and aggregating these representations improves inference of what and where. Architectural efforts are exploring many dimensions for network backbones, designing deeper or wider architectures, but how to best aggregate layers and blocks across a network deserves further attention. Although skip connections have been incorporated to combine la…
This paper introduces a novel method to super-resolve multi-spectral images captured by modern real-time single-shot mosaic image sensors, also known as multi-spectral cameras. Our contribution is two-fold. Firstly, we super-resolve multi-spectral images from mosaic images rather than image cubes, which helps to take into account the spatial offset of each wavelength. Secondly, we introduce an external multi-scale feature aggregation network (Multi-FAN) which concatenates the feature maps with different levels of semantic information throughout a super-resolution (SR) network. A cascade of con…
We propose the Part-based Recurrent Multi-view Aggregation network(PREMA) to eliminate the detrimental effects of the practical view defects, such as insufficient view numbers, occlusions or background clutters, and also enhance the discriminative ability of shape representations. Inspired by the fact that human recognize an object mainly by its discriminant parts, we define the multi-view coherent part(MCP), a discriminant part reoccurring in different views. Our PREMA can reliably locate and effectively utilize MCPs to build robust shape representations. Comprehensively, we design a novel Re…
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective models for different predictive tasks on graph-structured data. Recent work on their expressive power has focused on isomorphism tasks and countable feature spaces. We extend this theoretical framework to include continuous features - which occur regularly in real-world input domains and within the hidden layers of GNNs - and we demonstrate the requirement for multiple aggregation functions in this context. Accordingly, we propose Principal Neighbourhood Aggregation (PNA), a novel architecture combining multiple aggregators with degr…
